Entrevista com Alain de Botton

Arquiteto frustrado, é apaixonado por cultura, literatura e arte desde jovem. Optou por cursar filosofia para estudar as grandes questões da humanidade. Formou-se em Cambridge mas, tomado pela urgência de expressar seus sentimentos e contrariando a família, uma das mais poderosas do universo financeiro, virou escritor. Seu primeiro best-seller, “Ensaios de amor”, foi escrito aos 22 anos e vendeu milhões de cópias ao redor do mundo. A partir daí, Alain não parou mais. Influenciado pela literatura francesa, produziu ao todo dez obras. Entre elas estão “Como Proust pode mudar sua vida”, “Movimento Romântico”, “Arquitetura da felicidade” e “Consolações da filosofia”. Encontrando equilíbrio entre uma vida boêmia e burguesa para escrever, o autor não se separa de um caderno, seja para anotar ideias no banheiro ou no carro, enquanto espera o sinal abrir. Método, aliás, que originou a última frase de seu livro sobre Marcel Proust. Para pensar, Alain prefere a noite. Mas é de dia que ele transcreve seus pensamentos para o papel. Coisas que ama, coisas que odeia – tudo lhe serve de inspiração. A primeira viagem do escritor ao Brasil, em meados de novembro, foi para lançar seu novo livro, “Religião para ateus”, da editora Intrínseca.

Foi numa quinta feira do dia 24 de novembro que o conheci. Discreto, vestia uma calça social preta, camisa azul celeste e um blazer negro de veludo cotelê. Alto, magro, cabelos escassos, olhos azuis. Delicado e sempre sorridente, ele estava na portaria de um edifício em Ipanema, recém chegado de uma palestra na livraria Cultura, para apresentar, num jantar, a “School of life”. Seu projeto, criado há dois anos em Londres, se propõe a fornecer know-how para lidar com a família, carreira, escolha de livros em meio às inúmeras opções disponíveis nas livrarias, política, e relacionamentos. “Se eu pudesse opinar no sistema de educação do meu país, eu substituiria a matemática pela economia e incluiria a disciplina ‘decepções amorosas’ no currículo dos adolescentes” diz, risonho. A ideia surgiu quando Alain viu que as instituições educativas se comprometem a ensinar apenas disciplinas acadêmicas, deixando um vazio nas “questões da vida”. O encontro para divulgar a “School of life” foi organizado por sua prima, Jackie de Botton, que esteve em Londres, se apaixonou pela iniciativa de Alain e quer trazê-la para o Brasil em agosto do ano que vem. Mas o que eu estava fazendo lá? Quando soube que meu pai iria a um jantar com Alain de Botton, implorei para acompanhá-lo. Estava ansiosa para conhecer o escritor/ pensador de que tanto gosto e ignorando regras de boa etiqueta, que aconselham o uso de bolsas pequenas à noite, enchi uma sacola com seus livros para ele autografar.

Com o cair da noite, Alain só alimentava minha admiração. Dono de uma ironia perspicaz, ele despertava risadas e suspiros pelo salão. Questões existenciais hegelianas convergiam em discussões sobre casamento, filhos e até no número de beijos trocados socialmente em São Paulo e no Rio.  Como em seus livros, meu ídolo mesclava qualquer assunto com arte, filosofia e literatura, de uma maneira leve, natural e inteligente. 

Por falta de tempo (o filósofo foi a Porto Alegre e São Paulo e conheceu mais lugares no Rio que muitos cariocas, incluindo o Morro do Alemão) Alain me concedeu uma entrevista por email.  Com a educação de um lord inglês e muita boa vontade, ele me respondeu em menos de 24 horas essas perguntas que compartilho aqui com vocês.

Luiza Mussnich: Could you please describe a day of writing?

Alain de Botton: The problem with writing is that writing is the easy bit. It is the thinking that is the problem – and this doesn’t take place neatly between 9 and 6pm. Indeed, good thinking is utterly unpredictable and tends to take place at the weirdest times, perhaps at 3am, or in the middle of dinner or the bath or a plane journey. So as a writer, one has to be ready and waiting for the unexpected moments. If one keeps time like a lawyer, banker or post officer worker, one will be in trouble. Then again, if all one does is to ‘wait for inspiration’, there will be problems too. So writing seems to demand a balancing between a bourgeois sensible life and a bohemian one. It means allowing room for serendipity while still keeping to a schedule.

L. M.: Where do you write?

A.B.: Again, in odd places. Often in bed. Sometimes notes in the bath. I keep a notebook with me at all times. I wrote the last sentence of my book on Proust at a traffic lights at a junction in North London. I often pass the junction and feel grateful to the moment it turned red for helping to give birth (quite unexpectedly) to this sentence which was precious to me.

L.M.: When do you write?

A.B.: The best times are just before lunch, at about 11.30am – and at about 5pm. Nothing sensible at all has ever been achieved at 3pm.

L.M.: Why did philosophy draw your attention?

A. B.: It seemed a natural lens through which to study the big questions. From an early age, I was interested in culture, in art and the humanities. I don’t favour philosophy over these. I love Hegel but no less the art of photography.

L.M.: How did you become a writer?

A.B.: I wrote my first book, Essays in Love, at the age of 22. I had been thinking hard about it for the previous four years. Throughout university, I had been obsessing really only about one question: how do I find an artistic medium for finding what I desperately need to express? I grew up with a desperate need to express my feelings. Talking to friends was not going to be enough for me. I had to try to create that thing we call art.

L.M.: Who are your favorite writers? Why? Do they influence your way of writing?

A.B.: I like Montaigne, Stendhal (his diaries and journals), Baudelaire, Proust… All are French, and I love them for their vulnerability. They are men but reveal feelings in a way often associated with women. At the same time, they are highly logical and disciplined. They are alter egoes. They are whom I would like to have been or to have written like – if I had been more intelligent.

L.M.: If books were to be extinguished and you could keep only one, which book would it be?

A.B.: Proust is especially rich. There are deep thoughts to ponder on every page, but written in an easy pleasant style.

L.M.: Hemingway used to say that it is better to write when you’re in love. Your first book, “Essays in Love”, however, was the outcome of a disappointment. Could you please comment this?

A.B.: If you are happily in love, there is no reason to write. However, to be in love but in an unreciprocated way, then this is the ideal background against which to write. The book becomes a kind of love letter which is sent to everyone and no one. To write, one needs absence. And, however cliched this sounds, one needs a degree of pain – so that the book offers a chance for consolation and compensation.

L.M.: Did Chloe, the heroine of your first book, really exist?

A.B.: In exactly the way I describe her, no. But for me, she represents a certain feminine ideal: someone energetic, intelligent but unintellectual, gamine, irreverent, beguiling and a bit disturbed. She is the blend of three women whom I know and have, in different ways, loved. I created this character a while ago now, but of course, even much later, even these days, I come across people who in a sense ‘are’ Chloe – though I would never dare to tell them this too directly.

L.M.: You come from a family of bankers. Did this fact encourage you to follow a writers career? How was their reaction?

A.B.: I came from a family in which the idea of being a writer was simply inconceivable. Real men don’t write. This is for girls, and crazy people. So this created deep anxiety in me. There is still a considerable part of me that believes that I have let down my family and really should be in a sensible job – a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, a pilot… something more reliable, more manly, more credible. I have a terrible inferiority complex in relation to my chosen career. I don’t think there is anything glamorous in being a writer. I turned to this profession out of desperate need – for therapy. I wish I had been an engineer or an architect.

L.M.: What inspires you?

A.B.: Things I love and things I hate. So I am inspired by beauty and wisdom and also by ugliness and cruelty.

L.M.: How do you get the ideas for your books?

A.B.: I catch ideas on a daily basis and after a while I wonder: is there anything that unites some of the ideas that I have found recently. A book is always a kind of bucket into which one tries to pour compatible thoughts that have occurred over many years.

L.M.: Did you do any writing when you were in Brazil? (Apart from twitter!) If yes, what did you write about?

A.B.: I wrote in Rio. I briefly met someone there who, quite by chance and almost certainly without knowing it, inspired in me an unusual degree of longing and desire – and against the backdrop of the natural beauty of the city, I wrote some pages on the idea of the daydream and its relation to reality.

L.M.: You came to Brazil to present a project, the “School of life”. How did the idea of the project come about?

A.B.: One of the paradoxes of modern consumer society is that while you can find thousands of stylish businesses that will sell you the perfect coffee or jumper, disappointingly few enterprises are interested in serving up anything that could benefit your mind. Most education open to the general public takes place in gloomy lino-floored institutions, under the auspices of people who remind us of why academic is also a synonym for remote and boring, and why we were once probably quite glad to quit school or college.

That’s why a few years ago now, I came together with some friends to start an educational establishment with a difference. For a start, the “School of Life” has a passionate belief in making learning relevant – and so runs courses in the important questions of everyday life. Whereas most colleges and universities chop up learning into abstract categories (‘agrarian history’ ‘the 18th century novel’), The School of Life titles its courses according to things we all tend to care about: careers, relationships, politics, travels, families. An evening or weekend on one of its courses is likely to be spent reflecting on such matters as your moral responsibilities to an ex partner or how to resolve a career crisis.

The School also offers up a service it calls bibliotherapy, based on the idea that the real reason why most of us don’t read much nowadays is that there are far too many books around. Puzzled and confused by the choice, we just settle for the TV. To change all that, The School of Life’s bibliotherapists offer to come and meet you for an in-depth chat about your character and aspirations and then arrive at a reading plan for the future, which zeroes in on the books that could really pick up on your underlying interests and enrich your way of looking at the world.

Then again, not everything is light hearted. The School has a division offering psychotherapy for individuals, couples or families – and it does so in a completely stigma-free way. For the normally reserved British, it must be a first to have an institution that offers therapy from an ordinary high street location and moreover, treats the idea of having therapy as no more or less strange than having a haircut or pedicure, and perhaps a good deal more useful.

In a culture where anyone who attempts a serious conversation is at once accused of belonging to the ‘chattering classes’ and where anything too intellectual is in danger of being called pretentious, the “School of Life” is a place that attempts to put learning and ideas back to where they should always have been – right in the middle of our lives.

L.M.: Could you tell me a bit about the current situation of the “School of life” in London? Where do the meetings happen?

A.B.: We operate from a small shop in the middle of a busy street in the center of London. We are open to everyone, of all ages and backgrounds, and operate almost every day of the week. There is more information about us at www.theschooloflife.com

L.M.: What are you planning for the Brazilian version? When is it starting?

A.B.: We are planning a series of lectures and conferences. We would also, if possible, like to acquire a physical location. We will be up and running by August of 2012. We urge all interested parties to come forward to be part of our project. The contact details are on the ‘international’ section of our website.

L.M.: In your most recent book, “Religion for atheists”, you show how much you admire the power religion has to gather people in order to reaffirm and spread a belief. Although you are an atheist, what could one learn from religion?

A.B.: In my new book, I want to argue that believing in God is implausible and, for me as for many others, simply impossible. At the same time, I do want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that do open up – we don’t need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the center stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to loose perspective: to see the present moment as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour can be overlooked.

Now, it is important to stress that it is quite possible to believe in nothing and remember all these vital lessons (just as one can be a deep believer and a monster). I am simply wanting to draw attention to some of the gaps, some of what is missing, when we dismiss God too brusquely. By all means, we can dismiss him, but with great sympathy, nostalgia, care and thought…

L.M.: You said that if Shakespeare, Hegel, Stendhal and others had divulged their ideas in a “religious” way, they would be much more popular. Why is that?

A.B.: The secular world believes that if we have good ideas, we will be reminded of them just when it matters. Religions don’t agree. They are all about structure; they want to build calendars for us, that will make sure that we regularly encounter reminders of significant concepts. That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten. Religions are also keen to see us as more than just rational minds, we are emotional and physical creatures, and therefore, we need to be seduced via our bodies and our senses too: this was always the great genius of Catholicism. If you want to change someone’s ideas, don’t only concentrate on their ideas, concentrate on their whole selves.

L.M.: Are there any plans for a new book? If yes, what will it be about?

A.B.: The School of Life is bringing out a series of ‘serious’ self-help books in 2012. For this series, I wrote a short book about sex: trying to discuss its tensions, glories, difficulties and sheer strangeness.

L.M.: Was this your first trip to Brazil? How did you like it?

A.B.: This was my first trip and I adored it. I liked the energy, the size, the ambition of the country. I liked the cultural formation of the country, its essentially European nature, with a blend of other influences too. I fell in love with the country first via architecture, via the villas of Niemeyer seen in books. I am glad the reality was in no way disappointing.